


The Cold and Bitter Season

by arithilim



Category: Bandom, Cobra Starship
Genre: Collection: Purimgifts Day 2, High School, M/M, Pre-Band
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2012-03-03
Updated: 2012-03-03
Packaged: 2017-11-01 01:50:31
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 505
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/350652
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/arithilim/pseuds/arithilim
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Fifteen wasn’t the best year for Gabe.</p>
            </blockquote>





	The Cold and Bitter Season

**Author's Note:**

  * For [Roga](https://archiveofourown.org/users/Roga/gifts).



> Disclaimer: I'm not Gabe Saporta, and the following events are fakefakefake. If you're in this story, please be hitting the back button now.

Fifteen wasn’t the best year for Gabe.

The divorce hit him like the car he never saw coming. One minute things were normal, the next he was peeling himself off the pavement, collecting little bits of him and staring at the flames.

It wasn’t the last time his life would be comparable to a car crash, but it was the first, and the most unexpected.

(It happened like this: 

He was fifteen, and his dad was scheduled to work an overnight shift in the ER while his mother was out of town.

Instead, Diego Saporta walked into the living room at 8:03pm to find Gabe on the couch on top of Joshua Rosen, from his English class, with his tongue down his throat.

His father coughed loudly and walked out, before Gabe had time to even process what has just happened. He never forgets the sick panic. Needless to say, Josh left quickly.

It was half an hour, before his dad called to him from the kitchen.

Gabe walked in to see him sitting at the table, looking ten years older than he had that morning.

“Gabriel, sit down,” he said. Gabe sat down, wondering if the nauseous feeling in his stomach was how it always felt when the world was ending.

“Your mother wants a divorce.”)

He was left fifteen, and already betrayed by the person who was supposed to love him most. And he was left angry, so angry, at being taken in by his mom, at being the tall, awkward kid with too long limbs and too much energy, at being the weird Jewish Latino who listened to questionable music.

So he dyed his hair blond, and turned up Nirvana on his headphones, started writing. He stopped speaking to his mother and gave up on pretending like he cared in school. He laughed louder and played harder, and tried not to feel like a fraud.

It didn’t seem all that important that maybe he was bi, that maybe his old world religious dad had walked in on him kissing another boy and had never said a word about it. That maybe late some nights he wondered, sick to his stomach, if one of these days it was going to come up, a nightmare breaking out of the closet, and he’d be left with no family at all.

It was easier to be pissed off at life for making him this, for dealing him shit cards. It was better to lose himself in angry guitars and words spat at mics.

Months passed. He picked to live with his dad, permanently, even though they were back to a shithole apartment, this time just the three of them: Dad, Gabe, and Rickey. 

But Spring came, and brought Passover with it. And when he sat down to find a carefully placed orange on the Seder plate and his dad studiously expressionless, well.

Gabe stared at the table and grinned what felt like the first real smile in months. Maybe this life thing would work out.

  


**Author's Note:**

> Image used in graphic via [ultimategabesaporta.org](http://ultimategabesaporta.org), text from Pete's old blogspot (if curious, it's archived [here](http://icecreamhdaches.livejournal.com/678950.html)), in the style of [A Softer World](http://asofterworld.com)


End file.
